Flywire Crosses into New B2B Payment Verticals
Cross-border payments specialist Flywire is expanding beyond tuition and health care payments to offer B2B payments in several new segments, including travel, luxury goods, publishing, import/export, business/professional services and technology. Flywire already has several deployments of its new services underway, the company tells Paybefore.
The expansion was a natural progression for Boston-based Flywire, which got its start providing tuition payment services for students attending foreign colleges and universities, and subsequently expanded into health care payments. Already processing “billions of dollars a year” in cross-border payments in those two verticals, the company saw the opportunity to build on its existing platform to provide B2B payments for other types of purchases.
Flywire says the new services will be particularly useful for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that often have trouble accepting, tracking and reconciling cross-border payments, making it difficult to do business internationally. “In the traditional method of accepting a cross-border payment, there’s no visibility. When somebody sends a payment, there’s no central place a business can go to find out when the funds will come and see the check amount, and there are banking fees for both sides,” Jeff Althaus, Flywire’s executive vice president of B2B, tells Paybefore. Such companies may decide they can’t expand into a new market because of the difficulty of accepting payments, he adds. “Now, because we’ve set up a network and knocked down those barriers, we have client companies looking to expand into those new markets,” he adds.
Moving into new verticals was in the cards from the beginning, notes Jason Moens, the company’s vice president of product. “Our platform was always intended to be agnostic when it came to what industries it would support. Education was a go-to-market strategy,” he says. “There’s some difference in how we handle these new types of payments, but we didn’t have to build new plumbing to support these transactions. The core behind the scenes is the same.”
Flywire’s platform enables payment acceptance from 220 countries and territories, in more than 100 local currencies. It also offers 24/7 online tracking for businesses and their customers, along with compliance and AML controls applied to every transaction. Dedicated operations, sales and support teams are in place in the U.S., U.K., Japan, Singapore and Australia, with additional markets to come.
Related stories:
